Feodor Fedorenko

Feodor Fedorenko, or Fyodor Federenko (Ukrainian: Федір Федоренко; Fedir Fedorenko; Russian: Фёдор Демьянович Федоренко; 17 September 1907 – c. July 1987) was a war criminal serving at Treblinka extermination camp in occupied Poland during World War II. As a former Soviet citizen admitted to the United States under a DPA visa (1949), Fedorenko became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1970. He was discovered in 1977 and denaturalized. Subsequently, he was extradited to the USSR, sentenced there to death for treason against his nation and participation in the Holocaust, and was executed.[1]

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Fedorenko was born in the Sivash region of the Crimea, in southern Ukraine (then part of the Russian Empire). He was mobilized into the Soviet army in June 1941,[1] around the time of the Nazi German Operation Barbarossa. He was a truck driver, and had no previous military training. Within two or three weeks, his group was encircled twice by the German army. He escaped the first time, but he was captured three days later by the Germans and transported to Zhytomyr, then Rivne, and finally to Chełm, Poland.

FEDORENKO had the rank of an SS oberwachman. He was assistant to the commander of the first platoon of a guards company in the Treblinka "death camp". He came together with me from the city of Warsaw to the Treblinka "death camp". He took part in the shooting of citizens of Jewish nationality during the unloading of trains, in the undressing places to the gas chambers and to the "infirmary". At the end of 1943, he left for Danzig as part of a company of guards. I did not meet him again and do not know where he is now. — Yeger: Investigation Department of Ministry of State Security of the Ukraine.[8]

In 1978, he was arrested and brought for a denaturalization trial in Fort Lauderdale.

At his subsequent denaturalization hearing in June 1978, Fedorenko testified over three days in greater detail. He denied that he had actually entered the section of the camp where the gas chambers were located but admitted that he had once been posted on a guard tower overlooking this section of the camp. "I saw how they were loading up dead people, loading them on the stretchers. ...And they were loading them in a hole." Later in his testimony, he reconfirmed that this part of the camp "is where there was the workers that took the bodies and buried them or stacked them in the holes. This is where the gas chambers were." Concerning the unloading of Jews from the trains, he testified: "Some were picked for work and the others, they went to the gas chambers".[9]

Judge Norman C. Roettger said that the 71-year-old had himself been a “victim of Nazi aggression.” He ruled that the prosecutors had failed to prove that Fedorenko committed any atrocities while at the camp, and that he could keep his United States citizenship.

However, on January 21, 1981, the United States Supreme Court overturned this verdict[10] and Fedorenko became the first Nazi war criminal to be deported to the Soviet Union in December 1984.[11] A Crimean court in June 1986 found him guilty of treason and taking part in mass executions.[12] He was sentenced to death and his execution by shooting was announced in July 1987.[12]

^Holocaust Encyclopedia. "Trawniki"(permission granted to be reused, in whole or in part, on Wikipedia; OTRS ticket no. 2007071910012533). United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Retrieved July 21, 2011. Text from USHMM has been released under the GFDL.

^ abAleksandr Yeger (2012). "Fedorenko served at Treblinka". Report of Interrogation: Investigation Department of Ministry of State Security of the Ukraine, Molotov Region. The Nizkor Project. Retrieved 12 December 2014.